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Projects

Explore Evolution is a book and website published under the auspices of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. The book, authored by Stephen C. Meyer, Paul Nelson, Jonathan Moneymaker, Scott Minnich, and Ralph Seelke, seeks to put as many old-time antievolution arguments into the science curriculum as possible, without explicitly mentioning their preferred alternative. This, they hope, will make their text the basis of widespread lawsuit-free K-12 instruction. This is a vain hope. The antievolution arguments themselves are erroneous; there is no valid secular purpose in teaching students falsehoods. Further, the history of these errors is, in ensemble, unique to the religious antievolution movement.

In setting forth their arguments in Explore Evolution, the authors consistently present mistaken, weak, or misleading synopses of concepts in evolutionary science; overlook, misrepresent, or otherwise ignore relevant confirming experiments and data; and present their antievolution objections last, with no attempt to rigorously assess the legitimacy of the criticism.

Students should be taught the best available science, the science that has shown its accountability by presentation to the scientific community, a history of scrutiny and testing by that community, and, in the end, general acceptance of its legitimacy by the scientific community. Evolutionary science has that accountability. The antievolutionary objections of Explore Evolution do not.

This project is aimed at bringing together resources that discuss Explore Evolution, and to provide a detailed compendium of critical analysis that the authors failed to incorporate in their pages.

This is the starting point for a collaborative project. The idea here is to gather together the scattered information concerning criticism of antievolutionary ideas and rhetoric and make it available in a readily-accessible form. This is to be, essentially, a compilation of a history of ideas.

Format of entries

It will be useful to standardize on an entry format so that readers don't have to try to interpret several different ways of presenting information.

In 1981, a remarkable court case in Arkansas pitted creationists against pastors, priests, teachers, and scientists. "McLean et al. vs. Arkansas" sought relief from Arkansas' Act 590, which mandated that evolutionary biology instruction be balanced with "creation science". Unlike the 1925 Scopes trial in Tennessee, the Arkansas court heard testimony from a large number of witnesses on both sides of the case. Judge Overton ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, and Act 590 was deemed unconstitutional. Overton's clearly written decision has been widely reprinted, and is available on the Web at several locations (see below).

RSS Syndication

Antievolutionists Say the Darndest Things

Antievolutionists often express outrage over alleged incivility from those who oppose their efforts to evade the establishment clause of the First Amendment. But they have no difficulty in dishing out the abuse themselves. Here is a sample from the Invidious Comparisons thread that documents egregious behavior on the part of the religious antievolution advocates.

IDC advocate Jonathan Wells:

These critics include embryologists, paleontologists, biochemists, molecular biologists, medical doctors, philosophers, and even lawyers. Unfortunately, the North American science-and-religion establishment has largely turned a deaf ear to these critics, preferring instead to abandon classical theology and embrace metaphysical materialism and moral relativism. But I see the situation as analogous to the last years of Soviet communism. A small, powerful elite controls all the official information outlets while the evidence against the official position swells quietly, like a wave building offshore. Someday soon, to the surprise of many people in academia and the media, the wave will break. I predict that the Darwinist establishment will come apart at the seams, just as the Soviet Empire did in 1990.